I
UPERT WILSON came into the studio where his wife, who had been out sketching all the morning, was washing her paint-brushes, carefully turning and rubbing them in a pot of turpentine. She wore her painting apron, for Marian in the midst of her artistic avocations was always neat and spotless; and, half turned from him as she was, she did not look round as he entered. Rupert carried his stick, a rustic, ashen stick of which he was very fond, and his Panama hat; he was going out and Marian probably knew that he was going out, and where; this made it more difficult to say in a sufficiently disengaged voice, “I’m just going down to see Mrs. Dallas for a little while.”
“Oh! are you?” said Marian. She continued to stir her brushes, and though her wish, also, very evidently was to appear disengaged and indifferent, she was not able to carry it out, for she added, as if irrepressibly, “You need hardly have taken the trouble to come and tell me that.”
Rupert looked at her, and since she did not look at him, it was very intently, as if to measure to the full the difference between this Marian and the Marian he had known and believed in. It was hard to realize that his wife should show a trivial and unworthy jealousy and should strike him such a blow; for that it was a blow he knew from the heat in his cheek and the quickening of his pulse; but, as he looked at her, standing there turned from him, her blue apron girt about her, her black hair bound so gracefully around her head, the realization uppermost in his mind was that Marian, since the second baby had come, had grown very stout and matronly. He seemed to see it to-day for the first time, as if his awareness of it came to emphasize his sudden consciousness of her spiritual deficiency.
When he had met and fallen so very deeply in love with Marian, she had been, if not slender, yet of a supple and shapely form, with just roundness and softness enough to contrast delightfully with her rather boyish head, her air, clear, fresh, frank, of efficiency and swiftness. He had, of course, found her a great deal more than clear and fresh and frank; but, entangled as he had been in that wretched love-affair with Aimée Pollard,—the pretty, untalented young actress who had so shamefully misused him,—torn to pieces and sunken in quagmires as he had been, these qualities in Marian had reached him first like a draught of cold spring water, like dawn over valley hills. These were the metaphors he had very soon used to her when she had applied her firm, kind hands to the disentangling of his knots and her merry, steady mind to tracing out for him the path of honourable retreat. He had found her so wonderful and lovely and had fallen so much in love with her that his ardour, aided by her quiet fidelity, had overborne all the opposition of her people. Foolish, conventional people they were,—their opposition based, it appeared, almost unimaginably to his generous young mind, on the fact that Marian happened to have money and that he had none, except what he might make by his books; and also, though it was nearly as unimaginable, on the fact that a good many of these people were in the peerage. Marian, a year before he had met her, had broken away from the stereotyped routine of their country life and had come to London to study painting; and it was that Marian of the past who had seemed to share to the full all his idealisms. They had married within three months of their meeting.
From such a dawn, white, fresh, blissful, to this dull daylight! from such a Marian to this narrow-minded matron! Marian still had beauty. Her clear eyes were as blue, her wide, pale lips as sweet; but she was a matron. Her neck had grown shorter, her chin heavier; the girlish grace of glance and smile seemed muted, muffled by their setting; there was no longer any poetry in her physique. And as Rupert stood looking at her and seeing all this, his sense of grievance, though he was unaware of this factor in it, grew deeper.
A little while passed before he said,—and it was, he felt, with dignity,—“I really don’t know what you mean by that, Marian.”
She had now finished her brushes and had taken up her palette. She began to scrape the edges as she answered,—and her voice was not schooled, it was heavy with its irony and gloom,—“Don’t you? I’m sorry.” “I trust indeed that it doesn’t mean that you are jealous of my friendship for Mrs. Dallas?”
“Friendship? Oh, no; I’m not jealous of any friendship.”
“Of my affection, then; of my love, if you like,” said Rupert. “You know perfectly well what I feel about all that—and I thought you felt it, too. It’s the very centre of my life, of my art; my books turn on it. It’s the thing I have most of all to say to the world. Love isn’t a measured, limited thing; its nature is to grow and give. My love for Mrs. Dallas doesn’t touch your and my relation; it enriches it rather.”
Marian scraped her palette and said nothing. He could see her cheek, the cheek that ran too massively into her neck. Marian’s skin was white and fine; a faint colour now rose to it; a faint colour was, in Marian, a deep blush.
To see her blush like that gave him an odd sensation. It was as if the blush were echoed in his heart; he felt it grow and melt softly, and there drifted through his mind a thought of Mrs. Dallas and of her magic.
Through the studio window, draped with its summer creepers, he could see the two perambulators moored in the shade of the lime tree on the lawn. The babies were having their afternoon sleep. He was very fond of his children; and to feel, now, mingling with the strange, yearning glow, this pause of contemplative fondness, was to feel himself justified anew and anew aggrieved. The glow of tenderness seemed to envelope the babies as well as Mrs. Dallas. And it shut out Marian.
What had she to complain of? Was he not a tender husband and a loving father? Could she suspect his love for Mrs. Dallas—it was she herself who had forced him to use that word—of grossness or vulgarity? It was as high and as pure as his love for her.
His love for Marian had evolved into the perambulators, and this recognition, flitting unseasonably, vexed him with a sense of slight confusion that made him feel more injured than before. It was true that, theoretically, he held views so advanced as to justify, in true, self-dedicating passion, all manifestations. Practice and theory in his young life had been far apart; but the thought of passion, in connection with Mrs. Dallas, had, as it were, been made visible by Marian’s blush; and, slightly swinging his hat, slightly knotting his brows as he looked at the matronly Marian, he groped for some new formulation of his creed, since it was evident that however much he might love Marian it was no longer passion he felt for her. One must perhaps allow that passions could not be contemporaneous; but he had always combated this shackling view.
He stood there, gazing, trying to think it out,—a tall young man, well made yet slightly uncouth, with ruffled, heavy locks and large intent eyes. Something of the look of a not quite purely bred Saint Bernard puppy he had; confiding, young and foolish, with his knotted brow and nose a little overlong. And as he found himself unable to think it out and as Marian still stood silent, scraping, scraping away at the palette in an exasperating fashion, he said,—and now in an openly aggrieved voice,—“I thought you liked her yourself; I thought you quite loved her. You seemed to.”
Now that he was losing his temper, Marian was regaining hers. Her voice had all the advantage of quiet intentions as she answered, “I did like her; I thought her very charming. I don’t dislike her now. But I’m sorry to see a woman of her age behaving with so little dignity.”
“A woman of her age! Dignity!”
“She is at least forty-five.”
“I don’t follow your meaning. Is a woman of forty-five cut off from human relationships?”
“From some, certainly; if she has any regard, as I say, for her dignity. And a woman in Mrs. Dallas’s position ought to be particularly careful.”
“Mrs. Dallas’s position!” She really reduced him to disgusted exclamations.
“You know, Rupert, that there are all sorts of stories about her. You know that Mrs. Trotter told us that her first husband divorced her on account of Colonel Dallas.—Other stories, too.”
"Upon my word! You astonish me, Marian! You heard all these vile tales when we first came here,—from people, too, who you’ll observe, run to Mrs. Dallas’s dinner-parties whenever they have the chance,—and you didn’t seem to mind them much when you were going there almost every day—and taking every one you knew to see her. What about your Aunt Sophy—if you believed these stories?—An old dragon of conventionality like your Aunt Sophy! You took her again and again, and arranged that luncheon in London with her when you and Mrs. Dallas went up—so that they should have another chance really to make friends. I remember you used the expression, ‘really make friends.’ It’s odd to hear you talking of stories at this late hour." “I only talk of them because Mrs. Dallas has made me remember them. I am quite as open-minded as you are about such things. I was just as ready to think well of her—even if they were true. Why do you call them vile? You wouldn’t think it wrong for a woman to leave her husband if she didn’t love him, and to go with a man she did love. If Mrs. Dallas did that, why is it vile to say so?—Aunt Sophy, as a matter of fact, said it was a different story. And she was charmed with Mrs. Dallas, just as I’d determined she should be, stories or no stories. I did all I could for her, because I counted myself her friend and thought it a shame that any one so charming should be handicapped in any way. But I didn’t imagine that a friend would try to take my husband from me.” Marian spoke with severe and deliberate calm.
“I like that! I really do like that!” said Rupert, laughing bitterly. “It’s really funny to hear you talk as if Mrs. Dallas could owe you anything! I wish she could hear you! I wish we could have her dispassionate opinion of that hideous old bore of an Aunt Sophy. It was obvious enough that she put up with her simply and solely through friendship for you. Do all you could for her! A woman who has hordes of friends—charming, finished, cosmopolitan people of the world! Why, my dear girl, it’s she, let me tell you, who has given you more chances than you ever had in your life for meeting really interesting people! They’re not the sort you’d be likely to meet at your Aunt Sophy’s, certainly. They’d perish in her milieu!”
“Mrs. Dallas doesn’t perish in it,” Marian coldly commented. “On the contrary, I never saw her more alert. She didn’t seem to find Aunt Sophy in the least a bore. She was very much pleased indeed to lunch there and she has looked her up every time she’s gone to London since; moreover, she’s going to stay with her at Crofts this autumn. It doesn’t look like boredom.”
“I wish her joy of Crofts! She’s a complete woman of the world, of course, and she knows how to put up with all sorts and conditions of bores. She’s taken on Lady Sophy because she’s your friend. It’s pitiful—it’s unbelievable to see her so misjudged!—Take me from you! I’ve never gone there but she’s asked me why you didn’t come. She still sends you flowers pretty well every day. Those are hers, I see. I’m glad that you’ve deigned to put them in water.”
The tall sheaf of carnations, white and rose and yellow, that stood in a jug on a shelf in the studio must, evidently, have come from Mrs. Dallas’s garden. No other person grew such carnations. The garden at Ashleigh Lodge, this pleasant country house that they had taken for the six summer months, was not its strong point, and Mrs. Dallas had kept them reinforced from her abundance. Rupert associated the carnations, their soft and glowing colours, their formal grace and spicy sweetness, with the whole growth of his devotion to Mrs. Dallas. He fixed his indignant eyes on them now.
“Of course I put them into water. I am going to arrange them and take them into the drawing-room presently,” said Marian with her hateful calm. “But they give me no more pleasure. Nor does she. She is like them. They are heartless flowers and she is a heartless woman. I see quite plainly now what I didn’t see before. She’s that type,—the smiling, calculating siren. She lives for admiration; she’s herself only when she has someone at her feet, and she’s seen to it that you should be,—though I’m bound to say that you haven’t made it difficult for her. It fits in with all the stories.”
Rupert, at this, turned away and went out. He thrust his hat firmly down on his fair locks and swung his stick as he strode by the little footpath through the woods. Bitter disappointment with Marian surged in him, and hot anger, but above all an atoning tenderness that seemed almost to break his heart in its longing to protect and justify the woman so traduced by her. His head throbbed and drummed as he went. To have it come to this! To have such hands laid on it—their love! their silent, hidden love! That Mrs. Dallas returned his love he seemed to see, with many other things, clearly, rapturously, if with trembling, for the first time to-day. He saw it with Marian’s unworthiness; Marian’s unworthiness had shown it to him; and now, exulting, he claimed it. She loved him, veiling the depth in her vagueness, her aloofness, her indulgent irony. His mind retraced, with yearning gratitude, the steps of their relationship. No one had ever been to him what she was. How she helped and lifted him! How juvenile and undiscriminating in their happy acceptances were Marian’s appreciations of his work beside Mrs. Dallas’s half-idle comments. He had read through to her, in manuscript, all his last novel; and Marian had not seen it yet. He had not wanted to read it to Marian; and she, besides, had been very busy with her painting.
Mrs. Dallas had listened to the novel almost every day, sitting in the shade of her veranda, in her white dress, with the hands that, unless she were gardening, seemed always exquisitely idle, yet that in their idleness seemed to dream and smile;—he could see the white skin, the delicate finger-tips, the pearls and rubies slipping down, and his heart contracted with a pang and ecstasy as he saw himself holding her hand, kissing it. He must kiss it, to-day, and he must tell her. For she needed him; he was sure of it. She needed him terribly. If she lifted him, yet how much, too, he could lift her, out of the lethargic shallows and sullen quagmires of her life.
She could not be happy with her husband. He felt himself shut his eyes before the retrospect of what the disenchantments and disasters must be that lay behind her. If she had taken great risks, with that heart of highest courage he divined in her, if she had faced great sacrifices for her present husband, what wonder that her loveliness was now clouded by that irony and languor? She was not kind to Colonel Dallas; he could not hide from himself that she was not kind to him; but, as he owned it, he yearned over her with a deeper comprehension of tenderness, feeling his rights the greater. How could she be kind to the selfish, complaining, elegant old man?—for, to Rupert, Colonel Dallas’s fifty-five years seemed old. She never said anything actually sharp or disagreeable to him—even when he was at his most fretful and tiresome; but when he was least so she was not any the kinder, and by her glances, by the inflections of her cool and indolent voice in answering him, she displayed to the full, to others and to himself, did he take the pains to see it, how dull and how tiresome she found him. No; she was like a weary, naughty child in this; and seeing her as a child, with a child’s faults—and did it not prove how unblinded his love must be that he should see it?—he felt himself fold her to his heart in a tenderness more than a lover’s; a paternal passion was in it; he had known that it must be in true love; he had said so in one of his books. How his books would grow from his knowledge of her!